As time passed, I found myself carrying mints with me on a regular basis. I also ended up buying an iPhone and it was really was no big deal to carry my iPhone and my work Blackberry with me. At work we have a fairly large campus and I find myself having to walk from building to building and it’s nice to always be able to whip out my sunglasses.

Depending on what I am doing, like traveling or attending a conference or even just an off campus meeting, I will carry some additional supplies like hand sanitizer, tissues, business cards (forgot to add those to the picture), a camera, usb stick (another thing I forgot to get in the picture) and/or a notebook.

One of the added benefits to a blazer is that when I am at my desk I can take my blazer off and I am comfortable. I’ve taken to wearing blazers even when I am not necessarily at work. There is also the “gentlemanly” aspect of it. It’s so nice to be able to offer my jacket to the wife or my kids when we are out and they find themselves with a little chill.

I live in southern California and I wear a blazer year round. It doesn’t really add any discomfort from a heat perspective. Keep in mind, I work in an office and am not exactly out jogging around town in it.

I think more guys should think about wearing blazers, it’s way better then carrying around a murse.

Well now lump Eric Van Johnson in this category, hopefully minus the legal issues for awhile. In what will most certainly send this companies revenues through the roof, I have done my first video “endorsement” of a product. Now this is not my first brush with Internet stardom, a few years back I got my picture taken with Irina Slutsky of GETV but that was different she was more stalking me than anything else, this time it was business.

Oddly enough it’s not an Open Source product and I don’t even particularly care for it’s licensing model but with that aside, the product itself is very solid. Splunk on the most basic level is a indexing and search service for system log files. But its extendability really expands the product much further than just that.

Check out my video endorsement and then go and buy stock in this company. Mind you they are not publicly traded at this time but you shouldn’t let that stop you as they are obviously going to go main stream now that they have me doing commercials for them

Splunk> Eric Van Johnson

http://www.splunk.com/article/2741

But I digress because that is not the reason of this post. No, the reason for this quick little posting is to let my family and friends know that I am approaching 3 years of being “cancer free” and that in my appointment with my Oncologist today he informed me that my numbers where looking so good, I would not need to come back and see him for an entire year. On top of that, no more CAT scans.

All great news and I wanted to make sure to share it with everyone. I now return you back to your normal life already in progress.

Check it out, I am Radioactive again.
For those of you who follow my story, you might remember this is not this first time I’ve become radioactive but this time they gave me a cool card. This is so if I happen to set off a Geiger Counter (seriously). I totally want to go somewhere and set off a geiger counter. The key is in the timing, you have to say “What is that green ooze?” right before the alarm sounds. Where does a man have to go to set off a radiation leak alarm???

When I was going through treatment, the one place I would go when I had days off was Torrey Pines State Reserve and either walk the shore or hike to the edge of one of the cliffs. For my birthday today I decide to take my girls there and show them where their Dad would try and find his center.

I took Brenda down to TJ during her trip out here. First time I’ve been down there myself in years so you know I had to take advantage of the whole 3 tacos and 2 beers for 2 bucks.

So, if you recall one of my follow up treatments for the next several years is to have a CAT Scan and blood work done routinely every 3 months. The CT is not one of my favorite tests since they hook me up to this IV and pump something into me during the Scan. But hey, if that is the worse of it, I’m happy. Anyways, the first one was a big deal because it was the first time my body would have been normalized in months and the first opportunity to tell if chemo got all the cancer. I ended up doing that test at the beginning of January and everything came back normal; great news for me.

My oncologist introduced me to another of his patients, Paul, who was also diagnosed with testicular cancer only on a much more Lance Armstrong level than I. He actually has been back to a somewhat normal life for about 2 years I think. So we’ve been getting together for a beer about once a month and the good doctor has even joined us once. I asked the Good Doctor if I was in fact “cured” and the way he explained was that I am considered in remission for now. If I go the 3 (or so years) without the cancer coming back, then they kind of start saying I am “cancer free”. As an Oncologist, he rarely ever uses the term “cured” but from a more general public understanding I would be considered that.

I started playing baseball again which was a huge personal achievement for me. I do love playing baseball. It’s still taking a lot of out me but I’ve felt that had been happening more and more gradually over the years anyways. Probably has more to do with age than anything else. The girls and I have taken to walking to a local park pretty much every weekend which has been fun. Usually my sister, Theta, and I walk them there. I have taken to bringing a basketball with me and shooting around with her while the girls did their thing. It has been forever since I had picked up a basketball so that has been a lot of fun and one day I actually plan on getting good enough to beat my sister.

That’s about it for now. Take it easy.

ESBN 91962-060304-836754-62

OK, let’s not get started on that again. My sister has decided to hang out here for awhile and has gotten a job with Bek. It’s really nice having here around and she seems to enjoy being here which is nice. Since I was feeling better, I decided to go through some picture that I hadn’t gotten up on the website yet. I usually go through a process to up load pictures where I resize them all, optimize them for the web, run a small program to make the thumb nail and a few other steps. Well, I had been hearing so much about flickr.com accounts that I decided to give the free service a try and I must say it is working out pretty nicely. It seems very simple to use and I would probably recommend to any of you who would like to share pictures online. You don’t have to have a webpage, you can protect pictures if you don’t want them viewed by the world and a few other cool features. I would think even a pretty novice user would be able to use this. And the real reason I signed up was to get the cool flash badge you see to the right (assuming this article is still on the homepage). Most of the pictures are from before all the health events in my life, some are during and there are a few after (mostly the Disney ones). Hope everyone enjoys them.

While I’m on the topic on free online services, another one I have really gotten addicted to has been del.icio.us. This is a online/social bookmarking site. Being someone who works on many computers in a single day, it’s always been somewhat of a challenge to try and keep my bookmarks in sync. Switching to Firefox helped out to some degree because it offered a plug-in extensions that would sync bookmarks to a central server. (Quick side note, if you haven’t started using Firefox you really should look into it. It does everything Internet Explorer does and much, much more. And it if free. I won’t get too much on this soap box for this posting but will probably re-visit it later But even the Bookmark sync wasn’t a perfect solution. It had to talk to a central server, assuming you had one at your disposal, and sometime it just didn’t work that will.

At first I was a little leery about storing my bookmarks online. My first concerned was, what if I needed my bookmarks and couldn’t get online to get them. That was one of those slap on the forehead moments when I realized that if I couldn’t get online, the chances are I didn’t really need my bookmarks either because I had no internet connection to use them. Now if for some reason you do know of a reason why you might need your bookmarks offline,del.icio.us does offer the ability to export your bookmarks which you can then either keep as a standard HTML file or import them into another browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox. And again, Firefox even has an extension which will go out to your del.icio.us account and sync up your local bookmarks with those stored on your del.icio.us account.

My other concern was the fact that the world can see your bookmarks. This freak me out for the longest time and was the biggest reason I was shying away from using the service. The more I thought about it, the more I was unsure why this concerned me. Bookmarks aren’t exactly secret documents, matter of fact more times than not they link to very public websites. So what did I care if someone was interested in what I considered “Bookmarkable”. As a matter of fact, you are more than welcome to check out my bookmarks on your own, just go to http://del.icio.us/Shocm. As you’ll see, most of them are pretty geek related but there are some other good ones in there. Now there are still those administrative links that I don’t bother to put on del.icio.us and just use the traditional bookmarks for. For the most part however, del.icio.us is the way to go for all my general bookmarking needs and now, as long as I am connected to the internet I will always have my bookmarks. I have found myself using this service everyday.

Honestly, I don’t know for sure if this means I am “cancer free” or just in remission but I do know I feel great, better than I have in months, and I am looking forward to getting back into shape. Although, I guess round is considered a shape.